The front of a catalog is naturally going to be filled with the most prominent items. I’ve said again and again that certain items just need to be given more attention. If these are the things that you know you’re going to make the most money from than these are the things that need to be given all the attention they deserve.
But one thing I’ve noticed is the tendency to not only give the items in the back page less attention, which is fine, but to give them almost no attention at all. The descriptions are minimal to the point of not even being helpful, and the images are compressed into such a small size I have trouble understanding what I’m looking at.
No one catalog printing order is likely to contain every single product you carry. When it comes time to create your catalog you need to make those decision about what you’re going to put in and what gets left on the cutting room floor. Because of this every single item you put in that catalog was chosen for a reason.
Yes, the front pages will be given star treatment, but you also chose to put those other items in, even if you aren’t giving them as much attention. You still need to provide people with solid descriptions and easy access to see what they are and whether or not they’ll have interest in buying them.
Putting all of them in the back is the first thing that should change some. The reason is because I’ve noticed a tendency in myself to stop flipping through the pages once I realize I’m getting back towards the less important products. These pages just aren’t as interesting and so they gain less attention.
Instead what you do is space out your top selling products. Have two or three pages that are dedicated to a handful of big name items followed by three or four pages of smaller, less important items.
This way you generate more attention for the other items because people are going to be flipping more slowly through the catalog. You of course then follow these pages up by another handful of top sellers.
One nice thing to do is space out your products depending on what types of items they are. This way you can have the best items in one category in the front of that section followed by the rest of them, and then the next section will again start with stronger images.
No matter what you choose just remember to keep your catalog printing interesting from the first page to the last page. If people are going to stop reading before they hit the last page you’re failing to generate the amount of attention you should be. Make sure no one puts down your catalog until the catalog is over. |
